Top 100 Louise Erdrich Quotes
#1. Some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.
Louise Erdrich
#2. I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.
Louise Erdrich
#4. The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.
Louise Erdrich
#5. A MAN FINDS happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope.
Louise Erdrich
#8. He gives very questioning sermons, Bazil. Sometimes I wonder if he's entirely stable, or then again, if he might be simply ... intelligent.
Louise Erdrich
#9. By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.
Louise Erdrich
#10. From Mooshum to Sonja, back and forth. They wouldn't look at each other. I'm gonna ask you to leave in a nice way, Joe.
Louise Erdrich
#11. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things - forms of light, forms of cloud, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon.
Louise Erdrich
#13. Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.
Louise Erdrich
#14. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
#15. They're all the same
the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor
they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth
Louise Erdrich
#17. All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.
Louise Erdrich
#18. Our reservation is not real estate, luck fades when sold. Attraction has no staying power, no weight, no heart.
Louise Erdrich
#19. I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
#20. Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
Louise Erdrich
#21. He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback.
Louise Erdrich
#22. I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.
Louise Erdrich
#23. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.
Louise Erdrich
#24. The pleasure of this sort of life-bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life- had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing.
Louise Erdrich
#25. What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.
Louise Erdrich
#26. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
Louise Erdrich
#28. There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land.
Louise Erdrich
#29. This was our ritual. Our breaking break, our communion. and it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. By now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.
Louise Erdrich
#30. We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
Louise Erdrich
#32. There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
Louise Erdrich
#33. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Louise Erdrich
#35. It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes.
Louise Erdrich
#36. On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.
Louise Erdrich
#37. All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.
Louise Erdrich
#38. I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.
Louise Erdrich
#39. They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.
Louise Erdrich
#40. Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.
Louise Erdrich
#41. Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.
Louise Erdrich
#42. She had lived among those oak and pine trees when their roots grew deep beneath her and their leaves thick above. Now he lived among them, too, only he lived among them cut and dead.
Louise Erdrich
#43. Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.
Louise Erdrich
#44. There was the unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence
Louise Erdrich
#45. To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
Louise Erdrich
#46. He had started to understand how a woman's attention could succeed in making sense of a man's blind chaos..
Louise Erdrich
#47. You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure ... If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
Louise Erdrich
#48. It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
Louise Erdrich
#49. When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge; no fact can deflect their point of view.
Louise Erdrich
#50. [On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.
Louise Erdrich
#51. Temptation is a slower process and you'll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep.
Louise Erdrich
#52. What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.
Louise Erdrich
#53. It was Sister Hildegarde's belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.
Louise Erdrich
#54. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.
Louise Erdrich
#55. The Larks are the sort of people who trot out their relationships with "good Indians," whom they secretly despise and openly patronize, in order to prove their general love for Indians, whom they are engaged in cheating.
Louise Erdrich
#56. Whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom
Louise Erdrich
#57. I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.
Louise Erdrich
#58. the language he used survives in the law, that we were savages living off the forest, and to leave our land to us was to leave it useless wilderness, that our character and religion is of so inferior a stamp that the superior genius of Europe must certainly claim ascendancy and on and on. I
Louise Erdrich
#59. There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn't take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort.
Louise Erdrich
#61. I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.
Louise Erdrich
#62. Fidelis was not a religious man, except when it came to his knives.
Louise Erdrich
#63. And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.
Louise Erdrich
#64. We'd better get there soon," said Corwin. "They're probably building new streets in Paris right this minute."
"What if I don't want to, being a lesbian?"
Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.
"So you think it might be permanent?
Louise Erdrich
#65. She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.
Louise Erdrich
#66. Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth.
Louise Erdrich
#68. We try to press against the boundaries of what we are allowed, walk a step past the edge. Our records will be scrutinized by Congress one day and decisions on whether to enlarge our jurisdiction will be made.
Louise Erdrich
#69. She was as sturdily made as a captain's chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted road on curved white ankles.
Louise Erdrich
#70. A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
Louise Erdrich
#71. Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
Louise Erdrich
#72. I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.
Louise Erdrich
#74. Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.
Louise Erdrich
#75. Higher Power makes promises we all know they can't back up, but anybody ever go and slap an old malpractice suit on God? Or the U.S. government? No they don't. Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through.
Louise Erdrich
#76. So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?
Louise Erdrich
#77. Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.
Louise Erdrich
#78. I have never seen the truth," said Damien, "without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.
Louise Erdrich
#79. I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
Louise Erdrich
#80. You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
Louise Erdrich
#81. The world halted. There sounded a great gong made of sky. A gasp. Silence.
Louise Erdrich
#83. I've read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.
Louise Erdrich
#84. Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.
Louise Erdrich
#85. We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
Louise Erdrich
#87. They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.
Louise Erdrich
#88. Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.
Louise Erdrich
#89. The next world, of what shall consist its poisons and delights? Love in this world avoided me. And love's issue, beyond all measure. Immersed in the saltless broth of my existence, I tried on moods.
Louise Erdrich
#90. Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
Louise Erdrich
#91. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.
Louise Erdrich
#92. Why now that he's sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life?
Louise Erdrich
#93. Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.
Louise Erdrich
#94. Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?
Louise Erdrich
#95. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.
Louise Erdrich
#96. To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.
Louise Erdrich
#97. There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.
Louise Erdrich
#98. My mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.
Louise Erdrich
#99. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.
Louise Erdrich
#100. There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
Louise Erdrich
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